Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Apollodorus recounts a different death for Apsyrtus. When Jason and Medea fled Colchis with the fleece, Medea took her young brother Apsyrtus with her (or seized him as they left). Aeetes launched ships in pursuit. To slow her father, Medea killed the child, cut his body into pieces, and cast the limbs into the sea (or along the road). Aeetes delayed to gather the scattered remains of his son for burial, and so the Argo gained distance and escaped. In this strand Apsyrtus is not a pursuing admiral but a victim used as a grotesque brake on the chase; the crime happens in the waters or littoral near the escape from Colchis, not at a distant Adriatic temple. Apollodorus then has Zeus send a storm in anger at the murder; the Argo’s speaking beam declares that the blood of Apsyrtus must be purified, and the heroes are driven toward Circe, Aeetes’s sister, for cleansing—linking this version to the same purification need as Apollonius, despite the incompatible geography and age of the victim. The two classical lines must not be conflated: Apollonius’s adult ambush at Artemis’s shrine versus Apollodorus’s dismembered child delaying Aeetes. Both brand Medea (and Jason) with kin-blood and send them toward Circe; they disagree on where, how, and who Apsyrtus was when he died.